12 September 2026
The desire to seize the lion's condition of planet trade has always yet brought you to ruin, as it invariably creates injustice that makes the state hated, and a selfish and devious policy that prevents another nations from being friends with a country that cares for itself alone.
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A nation that seeks to take over the world's trade must become selfish, calculating, dead on the noblest impulses and compassion that the states should direct. He will endure insults in his honor, not to compromise his commercial interests in war; but to defend the same interests he will set off an unjust war under false or trivial pretext, and his free people will gladly ally themselves with despots to strangle a commercial rival who dared to drive out his kings and choose his own ruler.
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The soul of a greedy nation is stoned, as is the soul of a man who made the gold of his god. Despota may yet succumb to a noble and long - suffering impulse, supporting the weak against the strong, right against lawlessness. But commercial greed is selfish, gluttonous, unfaithful, deceitful, cunning, cold, petty, selfish, and calculating, guided solely by self-interest. Heartless and merciless, she knows no mercy, no compassion, no honor, which could halt her in her inexorable way; she crushes all that stands in her way, as the keel of merchant ships crush below themselves murmuring and unobserved waves.
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These considerations should teach us that justice to others and justice to ourselves is 1 and the same; that we cannot find our obligations by mathematical lines led by coal, but should fill them with a large ellipse marked by the Circus; that the boundary is the ellipse of humanity; and that we are only a point in its midst, drops in the large Atlantic, an atom or a particle bound by the mysterious law of attraction, which we call compassion, with all another atom of all mass; that the physical and moral prosperity of others cannot be indifferent to us; that we have a direct and immediate interest in public morality and universal education, in the goodness and material comfort of the general people. The ignorance of the people, its poorness and its scarcity, and the resulting humiliation, brutality, and demoralization — all of these are diseases.
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